That’s a two-edged sword argument that even I won’t wield …
So, first: As I am someone who is personally friends with numerous narrative designers, developers, artists, and musicians at multiple small (10 people or less) studios, this point of view is categorically false.
Every sale matters even more to those devs, and they have all experienced situations where games have slightly blown up on piracy where ~100-500 copies were downloaded (and a significant amount of dev studios can actively tell nowadays due to analytics implementations to the games), and those downloaded copies, if even half of them had been sales, would have meant the difference between worrying about groceries that week or not for the team. Even if those weren’t sales, people aren’t entitled to play the dev’s game (or any game, even big corporations) just because they want to.
Whoever told you it was “corporate nonsense” or that it didn’t affect developers directly was either heavily misinformed, or just trying to make themselves feel better about doing something they actively know harms devs.
Secondly: It’s explicitly against GDevelop community rules to encourage or support piracy of any kind, and doing so can lead to pretty quick bans.
To be very clear, I’m not saying that’s whats happening here, just making sure it’s explicitly known before we run risk of running afoul of that.
No where did I support piracy. But piracy aren’t sales and they never would have been. Those people would never buy it. I am only focusing on video games I know nothing about other forms of media.
306 page EU deep dive report supporting my philosophy.
This isn’t like black market food. If a particular game isn’t pirated that will skip it and move to the next ones. It’s never future sales. It takes zero profit away because that profit never existed. The sales never existed.
Any Indy devs worrying about pirating is doing it wrong. Especially with gdevelop there isn’t even 300 gdevelop games according to the steam database. Unless some of them are showing up as electron wrapped.
Until gdevelop gets an Indy hit on steam it will be looked at as a toy. The only reason Godot caught attention was because the unity corp hired that dell CEO who lasted like 6 months after he tried to charge everyone.
Overall my point no one on this forum has to worry about piracy of their games. Worry about making a good game.
the first time i ever pirated a game was because i knew it was terrible and the developer didnt deserve my money
Just to clarify, I don’t think you were glorifying piracy. Whenever the subject comes up in a GDevelop forum post or the discord conversation that I’m involved in, I bring up the rules to ensure people don’t get themselves in trouble.
That said, the article you posted doesn’t seem to prove your point. It has a big caveat (from the study researchers as well as listed in the article) that it has a 45 percent margin of error. This makes it almost statistically worthless in most cases.
Additionally, the sample size was only from consumers, only from memory, only from the EU, and not the actual developers. Again, I know people directly impacted by it, using hard numbers they can check via analytics. It can and has had impact. It probably has significantly more impact on smaller games than it does big ones. This is not a moral plea for people to make or change their mind, just a factual clarification.
All of the above in mind, I agree that GDevelop games are unlikely targets for pirating. Also note that Steam doesn’t require engine disclosure, and it isn’t automatic. It’s an option upon submitting your game to steamworks, and it is basically a field listed as “Include this if your licensing agreement requires it”. No real way to know how many GDevelop games are on there.
Hi all!
@Silver-Streak has right to precise the rules of good conduct.
If you agree, i will give you my opinion of an old time (early 80) where the games software are only material.
I was young and the games were already not cheap. In this time, some persons hacked all games even they were not very good. This “killed” many small developers because in this time, they depended a lot of publishers companies. Numerous of these last had to stop their activity because of piracy.
Even if i got the money to buy the game, i’ll pirate it first and play for hours, then decide is it worth it or not. Other times i just do it for the love of the game 
What?!! That’s a new and weird philosophy to me.
What if you don’t love the game?
And this pirated version can pirate your computer…
Not really, been pirating long time. Aslong you don’t download from shady sites you’re all cool.
Ey, Ion buy it simply
So if you eat part of a meal at a restaurant and don’t love it, you just walk out? Got it.
Well, i mean i already pay before i even get my food, and also if i know i’m not going to like the food, why in earth will i order it?
Dude i bought games and movies before and sometime later, they were taken down and no way to install them again. So ofc i have started pirating everything from them.
Also these days games 60$ or more and they turn out to be trash. Shoot that 60$ gets folk through weeks from where i live. Maybe you prefer taking a chance on wasting ya money and if you don’t like it, have it rot there on the shelf. Me? I don’t move like that.
I started a popular topic discussion, hooray! Actually wanted to achieve that since I joined any forum.
So turns out it is probably all 3 most likely reasons I thought of. Not surprised. As far as I can see no one who has published a game on GOG has chimed in yet, so I will wait to mark as solved for a while to see if someone does. And to find out what else anyone else has to say, there could be another reason to mention.
Right, I forgot that I read about GOG being more selective of what they will allow on their store.
Thanks for the link. I bookmarked it for possible future use, if I manage to complete a game worth publishing.
@Da-Just meant
If you can taste it in a restaurant, then if you like it, you buy it; if you don’t like it, you don’t buy it.
I did get it but just in this corporate world there is no tasting so it felt off to me.
yes, that is indeed what they might do.
So if I want to try a new drink in a shop but don’t know if I’m going to like it I should be able to steal a can and only pay for it if I like it?
Seeing if you like a game before buying it is what demos are for.